#don't get me wrong the SIFAS writing isn't very good

[ayakashibackstreet]

It just hit me, of course I like Eichi, I'm a professional Lanzhu apologist.........

[reikiajakoiranruohoja]

TDC-Essay: Intended morality vs written text

During Thra-Halloween, I caught an interview with the Riverhorse RPG staff about their TDC adventure book. Essentially, a Dark Crystal Tabletop RPG.

In it, the authors discussed how you could join the Deterge and treated it as a fun thing to do. They also spoke of skeksis cutting down a forest for logs.

These two things stuck with me because they showed how some writers treat the skeksis vs how they treat the gelfling and podling. One group is seen as a mustache-twirling bad guy and the other as jokes. The third group is just innocent good guys who are just a bit flawed.

Why I find this both interesting and frustrating, is that AOR and the movie both had much more nuanced than that. I have already discussed the gelfling vs skeksis one here, so I'll not repeat it.

Instead, I want to focus on things often left unsaid in both the fandom and the comics/extra material.

Let us look at the situation of the Thra-born species. There is this narrative I often see on Tumblr where the gelfling are the victims and the skeksis aggressors. Which is true. But not once have I seen anyone mention the podlings, the gruenaks or the arathim in these posts. It is only ever gelfling vs skeksis.

If I were cynical, I would assume that the other species are left out due to ruining the pure narrative people want for the gelfling. Because once you include the other species, it gets messy.

While gelfling are absolutely the victims of the skeksis, they are also the ones that benefit from the skeksis the most. Gelfling have seven thriving clans, a massive capital, a lot of autonomy within these clans and a lot of freedoms in general. If Essence was never discovered, they would have lived comfortably with the skeksis until the Darkening took over.

Podlings, though? They are seen as lesser by most gelfling. They are seen as jokes and not mattering much. The Deterge is meant to be a -funny- thing and an undignified punishment, because the podlings are dirty and therefore primitive. But since we have Hup in our cast, we get to see another side of Thra's politics. If you aren't a gelfling, you are disposable, you matter less and you best prepare for the worst because most of these mouse-elves don't even bother to learn your language. Let alone defend your rights.

In podlings, we see some good writing on unconscious discrimination. We are shown that podlings aren't just jokes and dumb, they are very aware of their place in Thra. Yet it takes the outsider Deet to call out something most surface gelfling blindly accept; podlings aren't just servants. It isn't that Rian, Brea, Gurjin or Mira hate podlings, but they just never questioned their own biases.

Arathim are another type of narrative showcase. These spiders have been chased from their homes and treated as outlaws by the empire. Their former homes are now the Grottan territory. Something most Grottan aren't even aware of.

AOR does a herculean task for presenting a group of hive-mind spiders, treating them as villains and then turning around and showing them allying with the gelfling on their terms. But also why they would dislike the gelfling in the first place.

With both the arathim and the gruenak, we get a strong implication that it was not just the skeksis who displaced them. Gelfling after all were in the armies of skekGra, skekVar and skekUng. Given the Grottan got the cave system, the gelfling clearly also enjoyed the spoils of war. Never mind few Sifa deciding to earn a few extra bucks by selling gruenak slaves.

All of this makes the narrative of AOR and TDC much more nuanced and realistic. The matters of the people of Skarith are complex and there is a lot of bad blood between them.

There is this unfortunate Tumblr habit of treating a narrative with opposing forces as oppressor and victim, good or bad, right or wrong. In these narrative limits, it is paramount that the right/good/victim side stay pure and clean of sin. Because if someone does a bad thing, this narrative demands that they then deserve whatever they get.

TDC does not do that, it doesn't let the gelfling be innocent or without sin. It does not let things be simple. Even if there are greater scope villains, you can still have a lot of interesting conflicts between Thraborn species without involving the skeksis.

I fully understand that the Deterge was meant to be a funny scene, and it is. But it also does the double duty as the sign of how the gelfling see the podlings. The purpose is to humiliate the lawbreakers, whether the podlings want to be washed or not does not matter.

AOR, like TDC in general, is not a story of simple good versus bad. Just because the gelfling -now- see the skeksis are trouble, does not mean podlings, arathim or gruenaks won't still hate them. And that is good writing.